


Thaw

by Matloc



Category: Kuroko no Basuke | Kuroko's Basketball
Genre: Anivia!Kuroko, Brand!Akashi, Fire, M/M, i'm so sorry for writing something this terribad, league of legends!AU, lots of fire, pathetic!Akashi
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-02-02
Updated: 2016-02-02
Packaged: 2018-05-17 22:22:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,511
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5887540
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Matloc/pseuds/Matloc
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Seijuurou was born to renew the world.</p><blockquote>
  <p>There was Seijuurou, a notorious raider who died without any name hopeful to his fortune. There is Seijuurou, wearing a skin of molten rocks, deep cracks running along jagged contours and glowing with a pulse of fire inside. Fire for blood, streams of lava sprouting from hollows meant to hold organs; for every step he takes his soul burns with a thirst. For vengeance, for destruction.</p>
  <p>He once was, and now he is again. Seijuurou, reborn in flames. Seijuurou, the embodiment of wrath.</p>
  <p>The world deserves all of it for killing him.</p>
</blockquote>
            </blockquote>





	Thaw

When Seijuurou wakes, he is trapped inside a ring of fire.

It towers over his form like a cage, its bars wrapped in red hot anger so intense they quake and hiss—reduced to a blinking life of tearing themselves to shreds, then melting together to form newborn tendrils of gold. An anger that proliferates as it consumes itself and everything around it.

Flames rise and twist to a midnight gale’s song, careening fiery waves towards the edge of the sky. As they crash into the dome of stars, a vengeful roar of thunder rips through the skies and wakes the earth.

Blinking away his sleep Seijuurou stands and peers through the flames, spotting vaguely-shaped silhouettes lingering at a distance. Smoke enshrouds their faces, leaving headless ghosts in its wake. Armed ones, if that unmistakable metallic glint at their sides is anything to go by.

All the warning Seijuurou needs to send his flames after them with a single glare. Screams erupt from the spot where a lone pillar of fire swirls like a hurricane, feeding on their flesh, their agony, making true ghosts out of them.

The fire soon dies out, returning the light to stars. Only a disappointing pile of ashes is left behind.

Seijuurou sighs, snuffing out the remnant embers poking through cracks in his skin. Another failed attempt by them, another sleep interrupted.

Humans. He must destroy all of them.

* * *

 

Sleep, when it comes to Seijuurou, is a dreamless break. A break in the eternity he has spent living as a man, once. To the last bits of his memory stopping abruptly a bare few moments before his death. For the rest he journeys across the land, silent as an impending storm. Laying waste to homes, stripping the land of its man-grown appendages and returning it to nature’s arms.

There was Seijuurou, a notorious raider who died without any name hopeful to his fortune. There is Seijuurou, wearing a skin of molten rocks, deep cracks running along jagged contours and glowing with a pulse of fire inside. Fire for blood, streams of lava sprouting from hollows meant to hold organs; for every step he takes his soul burns with a thirst. For vengeance, for destruction.

He once was, and now he is again. Seijuurou, reborn in flames. Seijuurou, the embodiment of wrath.

The world deserves all of it for killing him.

* * *

 

His waking moments are not much different. A vision framed by fire, an anger that scorches people on sight. Seijuurou has the deadly talents of a basilisk, conformed in a way that helps him bask in sounds of suffering rather than mute them forever inside stone. By his law death is not an instantaneous offering; else it would be called mercy.

He likes to think there _is_ a mercy to his actions; as he slaughters all human life he rids them of mortal toils and cleanses the world of its sins. He learnt a lot of things in his final breathing moments, that he is an existence too pure for a world tainted by humans. That his divine mission is, has always been, to mold it back to the perfection it once was so he can finally grace it with his feet.

He’ll be reborn again and become God himself.

* * *

 

A night of terror sweeps through another village. Flames bleed through shattered windows, flood the streets in a river of charred screams and bones. Fire is a death that strives to keep the mind alive and teach it true cruelty, but for Seijuurou the ordeal is over much too quickly. Under the solemn golden gaze of a crown rising behind ashen mountaintops, a carpet of cadavers rolls itself out for him, faces crumbling under his feet as he marches through his hand-created ruins—crumbling like dust.

That is the worth of human life. A speck of dust on a pristine map, provoking a hand to wipe it off. Edge to edge to edge, an unforgiving hand to rip holes and tears in its endeavor to clean. _To expunge_ , heralding an era of burns covering the earth and seeping through the continents, the oceans, consuming the map until only its cinders are left to collect at the wooden jaw of the easel. When time’s end is nigh, Seijuurou will spread out a blank canvas on its surface and, with softer hands, sketch in a world from scratch.

It comes from the distance, shrill as the wail of a siren caught on a ghost ship’s anchoring hooks. Seijuurou traces it back near to village outskirts, where the ash-pelted path tapers off to mingle with loose soil, wounding its way like a grey-tailed snake into a forest hailing towards the mountains.

Hidden amidst the splinters of crushed up crates is what Seijuurou can’t call anything but a human, curled into a ball, shivering and sniffling. It’s a tiny thing, cloth and skin speckled with soot, a frazzled shock of hair covering its face that he might have curled his nose at had he met it as a fellow man, all decked out in a shiny baroque uniform that didn’t quite belong to him, but one look at his straightened back and sharp tongue would have left any passerby none the wiser.

His shadow dwarfs the little human as he moves closer, and the noise fades into choked sobs. It turns its big brown eyes at him, face soggy with tears and snot. He waits for it to flee, knowing its tiny feet can’t take it too far before his flames catch up. But it doesn’t move, doesn’t lift a finger as it sits and stares as though the hulking creature in front of it is some roadside attraction.

Soon the tears stop and a quiet settles between them. Heavy like the smoke he breathes. Seijuurou mirrors the stillness of the scrawny limbs hunched on the ground, does nothing even as the child fails to lower its gaze. There’s no insult nor defiance to it; it is unintentional—it’s instinct, a smidgen of a dog’s fascination that allows it reprieve from the reality around it. A child this is, weak and easy to crush under his magma-striped feet. So easy to swat like a fly on the wall.

A creature not worth his flames.

So when his arm reaches out for the child, the fires along its molten cracks are extinguished. The human eyes the hand like it’s something to eat, as if it’s only ever seen bleeding volcanos jutting out of food stalls at a fair instead of skyward peaks bursting over horizon.

What an odd sight he must be to a child, and perhaps because it has never seen the world’s perils, pushing out of its crudely-assembled hiding place comes a lot more naturally than bolting in fear. It gulps, eyes flitting back and forth from the igneous plains of Seijuurou’s face to his rocky joints glued with streams of lava hardening in the air. Hesitantly, it untangles a hand from the shell of its limbs and grabs onto a rough edge of a finger.

A scream rips from its throat, and the child falls back onto the dirt, cradling its hand. The inside of the palm is turning a startling red, blisters breaking out on flesh as fresh tears leak out of its clenched eyes. Seijuurou’s staring at his own hand, because of course, killing his flames doesn’t stop the deadly heat emanating from within where his core swirls in a pit of bubbling fire.

But he’s staring at it like he’s never seen it before, trying to piece together a thought process to explain why it did what it did. There is no doubt of it being an autonomous reaction, a delayed reflex, but to what—to the sight of a crying child, to its misfortune closing in as a survivor to his wrath? He’s a body formed from hardened lava, feeding on fire as much as it feeds on his soul; his only reflex is to incinerate what dare lie in his path. A walking calamity is his penultimate role.

Nothing else he does holds any meaning to it, but his hand—he used it, and he used it without a purpose. If not to kill, what other purpose exists for a creature who moves to lay down punishment?

The morning sun’s peeking over his shoulder, charring the hand black under the shadow it drapes over crumbling pillars. Sunlight comes to kiss away scorch marks covering land, and while dawn still hangs low, smoking monuments toss their dissipating limbs to paint an eclipse under Seijuurou’s feet. As if in their dying will dwells a tribunal solely to point fingers at Seijuurou.

 _You missed one,_ he hears from the shadows.

His hand aches. A flame itches, short-lived sparks leaping across his fingers.

 _Why didn’t you kill it,_ the words crash accusingly like a tempest’s waves into the wails ringing inside his head. Washing away every other sound, deafening—suddenly there’s a crack in the wall of his memories, where myriad visions of his previous life lie imprisoned like stolen memoirs. An infinitesimal gap allowing him no more than a glimpse, a single moment encased in four walls, in the wrinkling of his nose at the smell of metal rusting. In the silence of a second ago, left unstirred for what had felt like an eternity collecting on the years everyone in the room had spent. A second later, echoing in the damp, heavy air like early pellets of rain thrashing barren land after a year’s wait, the cries of a newborn broke through sterile walls, broke down the eternity of silence.

After two and a half centuries, the first piece of Seijuurou’s memory awakens.

The child lies on the ground, squeezing its screams into sobs that yank tremors from its body.

Seijuurou can’t stop now.

Another low whine spills from its throat. Weak, tattered sounds like it’s losing the will to breathe.

Seijuurou curls a fire into his fist. It is time.

“Stop.”

He freezes. The fire in his veins is blocked by icicles that stab through every pore, his breath frosts over a tongue hanging limp, and a chill runs down his spine, stealing his heat away with a single word. Seijuurou doesn’t stop, _he freezes._ Turns to a statue that still remembers how to breathe.

Whatever physical impossibility managed to fool his ear is now no longer hiding its footsteps from him. Ash crunched by shoes, colors of unsung cremations bite the pristine end of a robe, creeping up the white—which splashes blue up the hood and flows into darker shades over the shoulder, the arm—like an infection as the figure kneels before the child.

Hands, as though broken free from marble, curve out of their sleeves to grasp at the child’s injury, muting its squeal with a hush. A faint glow envelops the tiny hand, and the child’s wet noises die out as it brightens. When it pulls back, its hand is not as fair as the ones that held it, but they’re clean and fresh without the burden of scars.

Seijuurou can only watch as the two pull themselves up, the robed one placing a hand on a trembling back to nudge it forward. The child looks up with wide eyes, a stray glance in Seijuurou’s way instantly sending it on its feet. The mage only turns around once sunlight has imbibed the last of the child’s shadow.

Eyes as blue as the waterfall spilling over its shoulders regard Seijuurou with frigid distance. Seijuurou’s lips start forming words before his mind can. Through centuries of cobwebs lining his throat, he croaks out, “Tetsuya…”

It happens in an instant. Tetsuya lunges for his neck and pain surges white through his vision. The last thing he sees is Tetsuya pulling down his hood, blue hair poking out that once felt so soft between Seijuurou’s fingers.

The next he opens his eyes, he is looking at a pair of hands. He does not remember this pale skin, this lightness, veins branching over an empty course of flames, stone chiseled into bone and sinew that flex freely as he brings an arm closer to inspect. He cannot remember belonging to a prison of flesh and blood and a wavering warmth only good for putting out fires.

But he remembers the softness of skin against skin as he grabs Tetsuya’s hand through a heavy sleeve and pulls until he’s close enough to feel the heat simmering in Seijuurou’s growl, “What have you done?”

He gets a glare in response. “I’d like to ask you the same,” Tetsuya grits out, and he remembers this as well. The glass of his voice holding back a flood of emotion, Seijuurou remembers it shattering in his ears the last time he’d heard it. The terror, the pleas, and this anger, all blown from similar sounds, only now it’s steeled to cut. He can tell, can feel its weight digging into his bare skin.

“Why are you trying to stop me?” He has half a mind to grab Tetsuya by the shoulders, and half to shove him away. But there’s a pulse underneath his fingers, telltale life beating through his touch. His grip tightens around the wrist. It’s been _years_.

“Because this—“ Tetsuya purses his lips, panning across the view before him. Seijuurou can almost see him reconstructing behind his eyes what was breathing and bustling a chance midnight ago. “This is wrong.”

“What is so wrong about building a world for us, Tetsuya?” he snaps, this time caging Tetsuya’s face, a shape so familiar it’s been etched into the lines of his palms. A centuries-old portrait. “I was doing this for us two.”

Tetsuya’s stunned face is baffling. Could he truly have been so blind to this?

“Why would you stop me now?”

“I cannot let you do this, Seijuurou.” As always, Tetsuya’s anger doesn’t last long, casting itself into a sorrowful look. Seijuurou takes a deep breath, smoke shuddering on his ribs. He does not need this. Not now.

“Why?” A broken whisper.

_Two hundred and fifty years._

“I need to finish this, Tetsuya.”

His voice must have been shaking, because Tetsuya’s arms come and wrap around his waist. Seijuurou goes slack in his hold, a weariness catching up to his newly-shaped bones that has them both sinking to the ground. It’s been so long since he’s been human. So long since he’s been rendered useless again.

“You are cruel.” His words are muffled by Tetsuya’s shoulder; the thick clothes stick to his cheek as he presses close. “Have you come to kill me again then?”

He can feel Tetsuya smile, a tender curve of lips brushing his neck. _How cruel_ —this too he remembers. “No,” says Tetsuya, stroking the bridge of his spine.

Everything comes to him at once—the ash stings his knees, the smoke burns his nose, and the sun beats on his back—he closes his eyes, curls towards the familiar touch of icy feathers, and lets Tetsuya’s embrace protect him from it all.

 

**Author's Note:**

> this will have a part II (prequel involving actual happy akkr) if there is significant interest (or when i'm bored enough to write one laughs) ╭(๑ ॔ㅂ ਂ ॓)و ̑̑
> 
> anyway i remember mentioning how kuroko’s a perfect tragic shakespearean char, whereas Akashi I think fits the role of a tragic Greek hero instead so the suffering here is mostly thematic and may not be as obvious but akashi is indeed a v pathetic char here


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